Long synthetic oligonucleotides for microarray expression measurement

Abstract

There are generally two kinds of DNA microarray used for genomic-scale gene expression profiling of mRNA: cDNA and DNA chip, but both of them suffer from some drawbacks. To meet more requirements, another oligonucleotide microarray with long was produced. This type of microarray had the advantages of low cost, minimal Cross-hybridization, flexible and easy to make, which is most fit for small laboratories with special purposes. In this paper, we devised different probes with different probe lengths, GC contents and gene positions to optimization the probe design. Experiments showed 70 mer probes are suitable for both sufficient sensitivity and reasonable costs. Higher G-C content produces stronger signal intensity thus better sensitivity and probes designed at 3 untranslated region of gene within the range of 300 pb should be best for both sensitivity and specificity.